In recent years, reading out documents using speech synthesis (TTS: Text To Speech) is getting a lot of attention. Although reading out books has been carried out in the past too; the use of TTS results in making narration recording redundant, thereby making it easier to enjoy the recitation voice. Moreover, regarding blogs or Twitter (registered trademark) in which the written text is updated almost in real time, TTS-based services are being provided these days. As a result of using a TTS-based service, reading of a text can be listened to while doing some other task.
However, when users write texts in a blog or Twitter, some of the users use leet-speak expressions (hereinafter, called “peculiar expressions”) that are not found in normal expressions. The person who sends such a text is intentionally expressing some kind of mood using peculiar expressions. However, since peculiar expressions are totally different than the expressions in a normal text, the conventional text-to-speech devices are not able to correctly analyze the text containing peculiar expressions. For that reason, if a conventional text-to-speech device performs speech synthesis of a text containing peculiar expressions; not only it is not possible to reproduce the mood that the sender wished to express, but the reading also turns out to be completely irrational.